The One You Feed - Jonathan Fields

Episode Date: October 12, 2016

Join our new The One You Feed Facebook Discussion Group   This week we talk to Jonathan Fields about living a good life Jonathan Fields is a New York City dad, husband, and he currently runs a mission-driven media and education venture, Good Life Project, where he and his team lead a global community in the quest to live more meaningful, connected and vital lives. He produces a top-rated podcast and video-series with millions of listens and views, where he hosts in-depth conversations with leading voices from Sir Ken Robinson to Brene Brown, Elizabeth Gilbert and hundreds more. Jonathan has also been featured widely in the media, including everything from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and FastCompany to Real Simple, O Magazine, Self, People, Vogue, Elle, Allure, and many others. His latest book is called How to Live a Good Life: Soulful Stories, Surprising Science, and Practical Wisdom  In This Interview, Jonathan Fields and I Discuss... The One You Feed parable His new book, How to Live a Good Life: Soulful stories, surprising science and practical wisdom The three good life buckets: Connection, Vitality, Contribution Improving your experience in your "day job" The mistake in his business manifesto: Thou shalt do epic shit The role that money plays in living a good life That the way that you spend your money plays a big role in a satisfying life What gives you a sense of purpose? What in your life do you do passionately? Sparks The middle way Three ways to deal with the energy vampires in your life: self-care, compassion & find your beacon That your life can only be as good as the level of your lowest bucket How to improve your life by assessing the levels of your buckets and what actions to then take Jonathan Fields Links Homepage Twitter Facebook Join our new The One You Feed Facebook Discussion GroupSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you ask somebody, what is your passion? A lot of people will look at you like a deer in headlights. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast

is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Jonathan Fields. Jonathan describes himself as a father, a husband,

a maker, and a man who cares deeply about, loves, and admires those closest to him and is humbled and grateful for the opportunity to create and connect and serve. As if that's not enough, he is also a serial entrepreneur, growth strategist, and an award-winning author. Another impressive accolade he could throw onto his resume is that he is a previous guest of this show, The One You Feed. His new book is How to Live a Good Life, Soulful Stories, Surprising Science, and Practical Wisdom. Here's the interview. Hi, Jonathan. Welcome to the show.

Hey, it's so great to be hanging out with you. Yeah, I'm always happy to talk to you. I think this will be the third time we've talked on air, once on your show, once on our show, this being the third, and we're getting to do this after you have released an extraordinarily good book that I'm really excited to talk about. Ah, thanks so much. Yeah, I'm looking forward to jamming on it as well. So, as you know, our podcast is based on the parable of the two wolves, and you got the chance to answer this once, but you're going to get the chance to answer it again. So, in the parable of the two wolves, and you got the chance to answer this once, but you're going to get the chance to answer it again. So in the parable, there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,

and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. The grandson stops. He thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So let's start with you saying what that means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah. I mean, I think it's an acknowledgement of the fact that we all have.

Actually, let me just make it personal, right? Within me lies darkness and light, and both emerge at different times, sometimes opportune, sometimes not opportune. agency, is that we may not have the ability to eliminate any one of these, but what we do have is the ability to choose which one emerges, which one we live from. And I've been thinking about that a lot lately, because increasingly, I don't think most of us do choose. I think most of us just react to circumstance rather than saying, wait, there's a choice to be made here. And which wolf do I want to feed as I make this choice? Yeah. In your new book, I think you call it an undiagnosed reactive life syndrome. Yeah. I may not have that exactly right, but it's something close to that. Yeah. And, you know,

the new book of yours is called How to Live a Good Life, Soulful Stories, Surprising Science, and Practical Wisdom. And it is, you know, as I was saying to you before we got started, it is really, really good. And it is, you know, it is exactly what the title says, you know, it's about how to have a good life. And it really does bring together, you know, personal stories, anecdotes, a lot of science, and some very practical ways to do things. I mean, as I've heard you say, you know, you can do this book. It has practical exercises for everything. So, you know, it's just a, it's really good. And I think anybody who is listening to this show would love the book. I mean, it's kind of right on target. Thanks, man. I really appreciate that. I didn't want to just add to the body of literature, because if living a better life was about information, was about knowing more, then we'd all be living fantastic lives. It was important to me to make something that actually just kind of simplified and clarified, but more than delivering information was something that was just utterly actionable, something that you could do. Because to me, it's always about

how do we create, how to create tools, how to create experiences that allow you to step out of just thinking about things, which I happen to love doing. And I know you do too, but I can get caught there. You know, I can spend a lot of time in my head, and that doesn't necessarily a good life make. To me, it's like when the ideas interact with the way you bring yourself to the world, that's when amazing stuff happens, and I wanted to create a tool that kept prompting you to do that. Yep, it does that. There's lots of different ways that you could interact with the book, and there were so many things in the book that we talk about over and over on the show. And I'm not going to hit all those because we, you know, we'll hit some of them, but we do that a lot. But I kind of want to touch on some of the things that maybe we don't talk about as much that I think are really valuable. You've got a very simple framework or concept that underlines this that you call the three good life buckets. So why don't you share what those are?

Yeah. And the idea here was, it's all about simplification. So I wanted to create a framework, something that would guide your behavior, where you hear it once, you remember it for life, it it can actually guide your behavior it's actionable and and working just over a period of years this idea of three buckets came to me so imagine your life is three buckets one is we'll call it connection one will call vitality and one will call contribution your connection bucket is fundamentally about um your relationships it's what jonathan height called the in-between. And it's relationship with yourself, with intimate others, close friends and family, with, if you consider it important, some definition of source or God or something bigger than just you.

And also with a like-minded community, with a sense of belonging. Your vitality bucket is about optimizing your state of mind and your state of body. And I talk about those in the same breath because in my mind, it's a complete fiction to try and separate them. And then your contribution bucket is really about how you bring the deepest parts of yourself to the world. A lot of people would call that your work on the planet. I hesitate with that label only because most people associate work with the thing you get paid for. And for some people, the greatest contribution is the thing they get paid for. But for others, it's not. And I think that's okay, actually.

Yeah, you and I have talked about that. I think we did when I was on your show. And I know we've talked about it, you know, offline a bunch, that idea that so much of the current, I don't know, personal development, self-help world seems to be all about you have to quit your job and pursue your passion, and otherwise, you know, what's the point of any of this? And there's lots of different ways to go about that, and that is certainly not the right choice for everybody. And is it necessary in order to live a really good life? Yeah, I mean, not at all. You know, it's funny. I can't remember if we've ever talked about this, but one of the things that cracked me open on this, because if you had asked me literally, probably even five years ago, there's a good chance I would have said, yeah,

if there's any conceivable way you can make it your main thing, you absolutely should. Then this wonderful book came out that I know you've read called Daily Rituals, you know, which for anyone who hasn't read it, essentially deconstructs the daily rituals, like a 24-hour cycle in the day of hundreds of the world's greatest makers and creators, from scientists to writers to, you know, artists. And what I saw, which is one of the things that really made me start thinking, was that a number of them had regular day jobs. And they did this, you know, their beautiful contribution, their great work happened in the five to nine and on the weekends. And it wasn't as if they were hoping to someday leave that main gig. They loved the fact that they actually had this mainstream job

that was comfortable. It was fine. It made sure that it took care of all their financial needs, their family was okay. And that gave them a sense of freedom to go and actually step into the unknown when it came time to do the real creative work. And I think there's actually a lot of grace in that option. And it's also really nice because it gives people who are a little bit further into life who don't want to blow up their lives in the name of following this one thing. It kind of tells them that's okay to do that. Like that's a valid path too. Yeah. And I think that's so important is that you can start wherever you are. I mean, if you, if you're not careful and you explore a lot of the stuff that's online, it's sort of all or nothing.

And I think, like you said, for a lot of people who are further along in life, deciding to jump and follow your passion without really having a clear plan is you're impacting lots of other people in all that. And I really like the way that you can build your way there. We had a interview recently that we released with a guy who was a yoga teacher. He's become a very well

known Ashtanga yoga teacher, but he did it. He built his yoga practice and his studio and all that while he did another job. And now he's at the point that he has transitioned full time, but he's got a family and, and he did it. And I think one of the benefits of it, and you and I were talking about it before the show, and I was about where you know this podcast is as far as a called a business i hate to call it that right but where it is with that and what i was saying was you know we're making some progress but the great thing is that we don't have to it's not like we starve if if this thing doesn't bring in the revenue that we would like. And the benefit of that is you can focus entirely on the product, entirely on the integrity

of the thing you're making, and you don't have to be making commercial considerations very early in the process. And I've seen a lot of people who start out with something that's their passion that very quickly gets perverted into another job because they have to make it pay the bills. Yeah, I've done that in the past myself. It's funny as, you know, as a past life in a very past life at this point, I was a lawyer and one of my first steps out was experimenting with a couple of different things. And one of them was becoming a personal trainer. And then I went into the fitness industry, but on the side while I was

doing that, I also, there was a window of time where I really enjoyed rock climbing and mountain biking. And I thought, wouldn't this be so cool if I could turn guiding people, mountain biking and rock climbing into my career, my profession. So I put together this sort of makeshift business, I called it Adventure Fitness. And I started advertising and we started running trips where we took people hiking and mountain biking. And we would carry all their gear and we would make all their food and we would give them this wonderful experience. And what I learned really quickly is the moment I turned that into a business, I actually really didn't. Not only did I not enjoy the business, but I didn't,

I stopped enjoying the actual activities themselves because they became my business and, and it wasn't worth it for me. So I wound it down because I was like, you know what, it's different when you turn something into your business. Um, it sometimes changes it in a way that it takes away the thing that you love most about it. You had a section, it's very near the end of the book, but I thought it was, for me, was one of the best sections that I really enjoyed. And it really, it talks about, it explores this topic that we're exploring about the idea, like, you don't have to leave your day job to be happy. And, and there's lots of things, but you talk about improving your experience of your day job. So let's talk a little bit about that. So let's say,

you know, you're a person and that's the position you're in. What are things that people can do to get more meaning and more enjoyment out of the work that they are doing, you know, kind of right where they sit? It's really interesting. It's kind of counterintuitive on a lot of levels. It's probably makes sense to point out this phenomenon that happens very often, It probably makes sense to point out this phenomenon that happens very often, which is that if we're in a day job and we're not digging it, there's this thing that we very often do. And I'm raising my hand here also because I'm quite sure that I did that in past jobs, which is that because deep down we really want to leave, we're looking for justification. We're looking to rationalize our, you know, our departure from a particular job. So we unwittingly start to do all sorts of things to make us like it less and sometimes even to sabotage what we're doing. And that kind of

makes it inevitable. So, you know, we contribute to the toxicity of the relationships. We contribute to the declining work product and declining efficiency. And then we just tell ourselves, this is terrible. I'm working with terrible people. They're demanding too much. Not realizing that we're actually playing a role in that. So one of the things I actually think is really important to do before, I mean, if you're in a place where it is really severely toxic and it's damaging to your mindset and your health, then of course you need to get out of it.

But for so many others, there's this middle ground where it's really not that bad. There's a good chance you're contributing to it. And my suggestion is before you even think about leaving, what would happen if you did everything you could conceivably do to make it as good as you could possibly make it? What most people find is that they can actually turn around the vast majority of what's going on. One of the counterintuitive things, there's some research that was done that I talk about in the book, and some of it was sort of explored at Google as well. And the researchers came up with this term they called job crafting. And what they realized was that if you take a job

that's not all that fulfilling, and counterintuitively do very often more, more than what's described in the job description itself, do things that you enjoy doing, itself, do things that you enjoy doing, what it does is two things. It can take that job and turn something that you dreaded doing into something that's deeply meaningful and you really enjoy doing. The second thing, as I noticed, is that the people who did that actually ended up getting promoted and being able to move laterally within an organization and have more freedom to then actually move into different positions. So an interesting example of this, when they getting promoted and being able to move laterally within an organization, have more freedom to then actually move into different positions. So an interesting example of this, when they were studying people in hospitals, people like the maintenance crews, the janitors in hospitals,

they found that certain of them actually found this job, which is, you know, an orderly or janitor in a hospital can be a profoundly demeaning and unsatisfying job for many people. But they found that certain of them actually felt like they treated it as if they were part of the care team for the patient. And they would go in and like part of their job was when they were in a room with a patient, their job was actually to help them heal, to help them get better. And they would have wonderful conversations with them. They would go out of their way to do extra things to make the patient feel better. What they found was that these people actually loved their jobs. They really enjoyed a job that so many other with the identical job experienced as something they couldn't wait to leave. So it's a little

bit counterintuitive. And those people end up being valued also and treated differently by everybody around them. Yeah. And I think to your point about making where we are as bad as possible, what I found is that often has the counter effect of enabling you to be able to move on to something different because it sucks the life out of you. Right. Yeah. be able to move on to something different because it sucks the life out of you, right? Yeah, exactly. And so then you're just exhausted. And so what I found is somebody who has, you know, built this podcast and had built a solar company and done things while I had a job was that the more I focused on making that job better, I was much more successful in doing the other things because I had the energy to do it.

And when I get stuck into the, I wish I didn't have to do this all the time, I'd be much happier if all I did was X, Y, and Z, then that job starts to really become a drag and it drags me down. And not only am I miserable, I'm not as effective at doing the other stuff because I'm just, I have that tired, dejected feeling all the time. For some reason, most of us tend to be wired so that we would rather find reasons to jump ship and start fresh rather than actually have to really do a whole bunch of work to try and change the nature of our current circumstance. And that's not just in jobs. I mean, that's in relationships, that's in health, that's in... We'd all rather

bail because we think that if we start fresh in something different, that will be the magic pill. Yet almost always we do that and then we find the same patterns repeating because we're the same person. And because, you know, while part of it may have been related to a circumstance, another solid chunk of it is related to who we are and how we're bringing ourselves to that circumstance. And if we never do the work to change that, then the pattern never ends. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus,

does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all.

Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really.

Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The other thing I want to talk about that I really liked in the book was, you talk about a time where you wrote out sort of a manifesto of some business practices.

And one of them that you wrote down was, Thou shalt do epic shit. And what's really interesting about that is what you sort of reflected on later about what that did and what that meant. Because I think it's a it's I really like where you arrived with it. And I think it points to some really important truths about how to live a good life. This is actually really the thing that that publicly kicked off good life project was I released these 10 commandments of epic business into the world. And they got a tremendous response. And one of them was that line that you just said.

And I thought it was kind of fun and edgy and it caught fire. And that particular line actually did get a lot of attention. And over the years that followed, I came to feel that that framing may have actually done more damage than help. And the reason is it sets the bar really high because when people think about, you know, like the phrase epic shit, um, they usually define it as meaning you must go absolutely big. You must do something huge. You must, you know, put everything you have against something, take tons of risk and make the biggest possible splash that you can make. And if you don't do that, you're wasting your gifts.

You're wasting your strengths. You're wasting your time on the planet. And what I came to really feel over time is that while that's inspiring for some people, it's also paralyzing for some people. And it's also, it's not true. Because there are different ways to approach epic. You know, there are ways to be gentle, to be gradual, to be progressive, to create what I call a ripple. A drop in a pond that makes its impact by just slowly rippling out and being expanded and multiplied and still having, you know, beautiful impact without

having to actually be this sort of big front and center thing and take the big risks and make the big moves. And I really, I got concerned that people wouldn't take any action at all if i i said the only valid action is epic and that was translated as this massive thing so i wanted to kind of reclaim the word epic and say hey listen you can define it as being the big wave but it's also equally valid to define it as being sort of like that first drop in a bucket, as acting with fierce intention and feeling fully expressed and being the drop and then having something bigger. Be sort of something that just emanates from that. And because that gives everybody permission.

That means that nobody is excluded from that particular commandment. That means that no matter what size it is, you can take action. And it removes the possibility that it's going to be big, you got to be famous, you've got to, you know, there's all these things that come up. And, and I do think that that has the tendency to paralyze a lot of people. And like you said, do nothing. And I love anything that points its way towards starting where you are and doing that you can, because you don't know what the impact is going to be. We had Colin Bevan on the show and he's got a story in his book. He's got a couple of them, but one of them that I love is he tells the story of a woman who goes to a forest to stop it getting cut down. And so she lives in one tree and what she saved was that tree only. Everything else got hacked down. And that doesn't sound very epic, right? But now that example, she travels the world and talks to people who are doing that. And so now she saved thousands and millions of trees

over a period of time. But if she had only judged it from that one little thing, it wouldn't look like it mattered. And so I think that's why we don't know. We don't know where the ripple that you say starts is going to go. And that's why I just am so in favor of doing something. Yeah. And I love what you said, Nick, the idea of starting where you are being an utterly valid option as doing, you know, that qualifies as meaningful work. I think it's just really important to reinforce that because like you said, popular wisdom and culture these days, I get concerned, really diminishes that. And I think it's important to just say it's okay to start where you are and do the one thing that you feel matters. And that's enough. Exactly. So let's talk about money. You get near the end of the book and you say,

it's interesting that I haven't talked about happiness or money, which are two of the things most people equate with a good life. And so let's talk about money because I think this is a nuanced conversation, right? It's fairly common news. We all hear very often like, well, having more money doesn't make you happy beyond a certain point. And I think we all on one level recognize that's true. And yet it feels like there's more to that story than we're hearing. So let's dive into that. interesting. You know, as I was writing, I was, I was really trying to figure out how to, how to talk about money and happiness. So, uh, because the money conversation is, is not as clean as even we thought it was a couple of years ago. There's, you know, so in, in days past, the belief was, Hey, listen, the more money you have, uh, you know, like the better your life is. Then along came some research that said, well, actually, you know, there is sort of a lock step relationship between how much you make and how happy you are and how good a life you have

up until a certain level. But once you hit that threshold, every dollar that you earn more makes a very small difference in happiness. And that data stood for a pretty long time. There's some data questioning that now. But also, part of the challenge here is that, you know, are we measuring the relationship between money and happiness? Are we measuring the relationship between money and living a good life, meaning being fulfilled and satisfied with your life? through life. Because if it's the latter, there's some interesting newer data that's now using a vastly larger data set from the Gallup organization that crosses dozens of countries and millions of data points that kind of shows that while happiness, however nebulously we may define it, does still seem to hit a certain peak, hit a threshold and lose its direct relationship with money. Life satisfaction may not. The data that I saw tracked it up until I think the cutoff was somewhere around quarter million dollars. What it showed is when you actually ask the, are you satisfied with your life question, that that seems to continue on as income increases.

And there are probably some explanations for this because things like great healthcare increase as you do that also. But part of it is also very likely related to how we define these things, a good life or life satisfaction and happiness. And it's really hard. What you find when you parse the research is you can't actually give somebody a definition when they're in a study of happiness because it's subjective. And the same thing with life satisfaction. It's just too subjective. So there's a lot of gray in the data. What they have to do is ask things like on the happiness question, did you laugh in the last 24 hours? Were you happy in the last 24 hours? And on the life satisfaction side, things like, are you genuinely fulfilled or satisfied with your life, which

people define in so many different ways. And there's some crossover. And it's conceivable where you could see somebody saying, you know what, in the last day or in the last week, I have not been happy. I don't think for the last couple of months, I'm not happy right now. But if you ask that same person, are you overall, are you satisfied with your life? Do you feel like you're living a good life? That very same person could kind of zoom the lens out and say, you know what? Yeah, I've got a decent job. I've got some great relationships. I'm comfortable financially.

I'm just in this window. It's just this is a tough time. But on the whole, yeah, I live a pretty good life. So it is a tough time, but on the whole, yeah, I live a pretty good life. So it is a bit more nuanced when you start to tease out happiness and the more broad sort of conversation around life satisfaction. And then there's this third thing, which is that the way that you spend your money is actually critically important in the equation. So how much you earn is only half of it.

The way that you spend your money is really important because that can make a really big difference. Things as simple as investing in experiences and things makes a really big difference. But then on an even subtler level, if you want to, let's say, buy a ticket for this wonderful two-week-long trip, if you purchase the trip two months before rather than two weeks before, it'll actually make you happier because anticipation of the trip

actually can really jack up your happiness levels. And if you give yourselves two months of that versus two weeks, it'll actually make a difference. So it's really fascinating. The conversation is not nearly as clean as some of the sort of gross generalizations make it seem. You know, I think money, like you said, is very nuanced. And I think that the thing that I look at a lot is, what are you trading for money? Yeah, that's huge.

The classic example is, you know, the person who works 70 hours a week, doesn't take any time off, makes a ton of money, but is just, you know, miserable all the time because they never get anywhere. And so it's like, what are you using the money for? And what are you trading for? Are you trading good relationships? Are you trading doing things that you love? You know, what are you giving up? And I think that's really for me where the nuance is and trying to say, okay, well, how much is enough and how much is worth trading? And it is sort of a tricky thing. on a wonderful vacation in Hawaii. But then you find when you get there, you're so physically unable and you have nobody to be with that you're unable to actually participate in some of the activities that would make this trip great

and you have nobody to share it with. To what end? I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's gonna drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. God bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really.

No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. In a similar topic, we've talked about the idea of, you know, you don't have to quit your job, you don't have to do something hugely epic. The other phrase we hear a lot in those circles is follow your passion, follow your passion. And you talk about following something different, that maybe following your passion is the wrong way to think about it. Yeah, well, number one, I have a bit of a challenge

when we use the word purpose and passion as a noun. Because we're sort of defining it as this thing that you actually have to identify and then become. And that can be somewhat disastrous for people who don't actually identify a thing. To have a passion, it's almost like you have to possess it and it has to possess you. But what if you don't know what it is? Whereas if we actually use those two words as adjectives instead of nouns, it changes the conversation pretty dramatically. So we can say, well, if you ask somebody, what is your passion? A lot of people will look at you like a deer in headlights. And if you reframe it and say, hey, listen, what do you like to do passionately or

with passion or what gives you a sense of purpose? Then all of a sudden they'll start to think, huh, well, there's mountain biking, there's painting, there's spending time with my aunt, there's all these things because you're not forcing them to identify a singular noun that they have to possess for life. You know, you're just saying, okay, describe things that make you feel this. And so it's really freeing for a lot of people. And, you know, the goal becomes more to figure out what are those things that light you up? What are those things where, you know, you can do them and they fill you with a sense of purpose and a sense of passion? I tend to call those things sparks. And to basically move through each day feeling like you're lit up and feeling like you're engaging with the world.

You're doing things that give you this sense of passion and experience of purpose, you do that every day. You do that today, and you put your head on the pillow at night and say, I felt pretty lit up. The thing that I did today, I had this sense of purpose when I was doing it.

And then if you do it again tomorrow, and you do something else the next day, and you do yet another thing, but they all give you that experience, then you find yourself months later or years later being able to look back and say, you know what? I'm good. You know, I feel like I have lived a life of passion and a life of purpose, even though I never identified like a specific noun that was this thing. Yeah, I think the way you phrase it, and it's a term I love, I think it's useful in a lot of contexts, is, you know, follow your curiosity. It's a great

way to look at it. I mean, and for me, what that thing is changes. You know, it's what the thing is that has me excited or curious or interested changes over time. You know, I just need to see which one it is right now and pay attention to it. Yeah. And it's so freeing to look at it that way, because then you allow yourself to actually morph and change and shift. And when it's time to let go of something rather than hang on and say, well, that's my passion. I can't let go of that. You know, you're like, no, actually there's something which is calling me, which I want to explore more with that fascinates me on a deeper level right now. And it's okay to shift focus to that. I've always found that to be a good compass. You know, it's interesting. I've, I've been fortunate to start and grow a couple of companies

and to sell them. And at the end of the day, when I sold the last one, which was a beautiful community-driven venture, I handed over the keys, I walked out, and I never looked back. And people have sometimes said to me, how can you do that? And my answer was because the thing itself, the thing that I created, never defined me. You know, it was a moment, it was a season that I invested myself fiercely in, that I really enjoyed. You know, the activities, the relationships, the setting. And over time, whatever the elements of that were that lit me up in the early days, lit me up less and less. And other things were really starting to call me far more strongly.

And at a point where it became clear that the other things were just much more interesting, deep questions, a quest for mastery, wanting to go into topics, that it was time for me to move on. And because I wasn't defined by lot of senses, right? And I want to talk about a subject I'm always fascinated by also, and you call them energy vampires. Other people call them toxic people in our life, right? And sometimes the conventional wisdom is you ax them no matter what, right? Like you got somebody in your life that's toxic, you know, night, night, get them out of there, right? Which is, I think a lot of us look at and go, well,

that may not really be reasonable or that may be kind of selfish, or maybe that's not the right thing to do. And so in the book, you offer some suggestions for how you deal with. So if you decide, okay, it's my mother, and I'm not comfortable cutting my mother out of my life, right? Like, I'm just not going to do that. But I'm also not willing to have the life completely drained out of me every time I interact with her. You offer some tools for dealing with these sorts of energy vampires. Yeah. Can you share what some of those are? Because, again, that's kind of the middle way, right?

It's not like I'm just going to accept whatever it is and it's not like I'm just going to cut that person out of my life. It's similar to the other conversations we've had about, okay, let's find the way that makes this work that works with our life and is realistic. It's the practical way. I mean, it's the way that acknowledges this is reality rather than fantasy. And the vast majority of people aren't going to blow up their lives. They're not going to walk away from every family member or the friend they've known since second grade, just because that friend may be going through a really tough time and suffering and struggling and taking it out on you. So the question is, well, how do you stay in it and be okay? And there are three things that I

think are really important if you make the choice to stay. One is self-care. Really, really, really making sure that you're taking care of yourself is critically important, whether that's meditation, movement, nutrition, sleep. These are the things where if you're not really optimizing, if you're not filling that vitality bucket on a persistent basis as a daily practice, then the mental and emotional impact, you know, it'll land so much more destructively because you won't have the reservoirs. You won't have the ability to actually weather it with more ease. You know, meditation, mindfulness can be extraordinarily helpful here because it allows you to drop things. It allows you to both zoom the lens out and understand what's really happening and then to

drop storylines, both the one that you're telling yourself about the situation and the one that that other person may be telling and see what's really happening. And once you see that, you know, two other things I found are just super helpful. One is a compassion practice, is a loving kindness practice. And this can be really hard to do. if you can find, if you can sort of zoom the lens out and say, you know, ask yourself, what is this person suffering right now? What is the conversation that's going on in their head that's bringing them to a place where they feel such pain that they feel the need to inflict pain on others? And can I stand in their shoes? Can I, for a moment, for a heartbeat, understand what's fueling this? And can I find a sense of compassion for that? You know, it's really interesting. I can't remember whether you've interviewed her, Sharon Salzberg. Yeah, we have. Yeah. So she shared this story with me where we were in New York City and as she was walking over to sit down for the session that she recorded, she said, as she walked

down the street, she just looked at each person who passed her by. And she was doing this walking loving kindness meditation. And she would look at somebody and say, may you be well, and may you not suffer, and may you be healthy. And, you know, what's interesting is we find that generally somewhat easy to do for ourselves, somewhat easy to do for people who we genuinely love and care, who we're having an easy time with, for strangers. But the moment that person who we love and care is turned from the person who we have an easy time with to the person who we're really struggling with, we really find it difficult to wish them well, to wish them ease. And so literally bringing that person into a daily loving kindness meditation a meta meditation not in the you know not doing it once but just making that a daily practice can be

incredibly powerful not always easy but powerful in first just you know seeing them differently and starting to find a sense of compassion for them. A third thing is to find your beacons. So if you know that there's going to be a window of time where part of your dharma or just part of the decision you're making on the planet is to stay in the presence of these people, then surrounding yourself with others, it may be one other person, it may be a small group of other people who lift you up, who fill you up while this one individual is emptying you out. Finding and being with those people can be incredibly empowering and life-affirming. And as you're struggling with a really challenging situation, it can help you a lot. I think one of the examples

that I've actually seen a number of times people have come to me with over the years, I'm not sure why it's repeated itself, are people that I know who are dealing with an aging parent. And then the parent has no other resources and the parent's spouse has passed already and the parent is forced to move in with them. And the parent is at a point in their life

where their health is declining rapidly and their awareness, their state of mind is declining rapidly and they're terrified and angry. And they're taking it out on their child, even if their child is in their 50s or 60s. And, you know, and you're not going to walk away from the parent. So the question is, you know, how do you, how do you get okay doing that? You know, and just like, incredible devotion to self care, really trying to develop a practice of compassion and loving kindness and finding one or two people, you know, if there's somebody that you can talk to every day or a group of people that you can be with once a week

where they just absolutely lift you up, those three things can really help you find a bit more equanimity in sometimes windows of our lives where we're very likely all going to experience them at some point. So you might as well, you know, develop the practices that allow you to be as okay as you can be. Yep. I agree. I think I could probably do this

for about two more hours, but we're gonna start to wind down here. And I want to go back to the buckets and make a couple points and a couple questions. One of them is I think most people do have three buckets. I think though, in the case of Chris, my partner here, he's got a fourth bucket, which I call the bucket of tears. I call it the bucket man. He calls his dog the bucket man. Now, one of the things I first heard you talk about the buckets a couple years ago, and the thing that struck me about them, yes, I think it makes a lot of sense, but the thing that struck me about them that really I've thought about a lot is that your life's only going to be so good. And so that, you know, being able to look at and fill the different buckets at different points is really important. And I thought that was a metaphor that really stuck with me because it's

like, there's a feeling of where you feel like you're firing on all cylinders. And, and if you look at it, it does mean that you kind of have those three things sort of in, in line and working well. Yeah, no doubt. And this is, it's actually counterintuitive to certain people. And I think probably the perfect example is somebody who's really trying to make a big, make their work in the contribution bucket, you know, to make a big mark and, and they're working really really really hard and yet they they feel the sense that they have so much more in them and they just can't figure out how to get it out so they start to work smarter because that must be the answer so they're working really hard now and really smart but still they just they know that you know there's this gap between where they

are and where they're capable of being and they can't't figure out how. It's like they've hit a ceiling. They're capped out. And the answer, almost invariably, is that in working so hard, and even working hard and smart, they've stopped filling either their connection bucket or their vitality bucket, or very often both. Both, yep. And the answer, which is where it gets counterintuitive, is actually not to work harder and not to work smarter, but to very likely work less and spend some of your bandwidth going back and refilling your vitality and connection buckets. And when you start to do that, all of a sudden the contribution, that ceiling that was just there and seemed impenetrable, it just kind of dissolves. And all of a sudden you find yourself being able

to operate at a whole different level when it comes to how you're contributing to the world. And it was by stepping away from that, that everything really sort of became freer. Yeah, I have certainly had that experience in my life many times. Yeah, so have I. You know, I focus too much on contribution, and I run myself and my relationships, you know, I neglect them, and then I wonder why, you know, everything kind of sucks. Yeah, I think we all have.

And I think it's also a really important lesson for people who actually really love what they do, you know, is that that can be a trap as well, because we can just do it to the exclusion of everything else, and eventually that's going to grind us to a halt. Well, as always, Jonathan, I love talking with you. I do think the book is really, really wonderful.

I recommend everybody check it out. It's kind of right on target with the way I and probably a lot of listeners of the show see the world and it's very actionable so thanks for coming on thanks for writing the book thanks for being a friend all those things yeah thank you so much it's always I always just really enjoy our conversations

so thanks for the invite and I appreciate you having me over alright take care bye bye I appreciate you having me over. All right. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye. You can learn more about Jonathan Fields and this podcast at oneufeed.net slash fields.